


5 Times Someone Rolls Their Eyes at Skye and Coulson's Inability to Stop Touching

by RowboatCop



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Cuddles, Established Relationship, F/M, Sleepy Cuddles, Work Cuddles, Worried Cuddles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-10
Updated: 2014-08-10
Packaged: 2018-02-12 15:33:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2115306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RowboatCop/pseuds/RowboatCop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Exactly what it says...a silly little fluffy thing because I couldn't write anything else today. </p><p>Because Rosalee Donovan pointed out that two sexy orphans would, once they started regularly exchanging affection, find it way too nice to ever stop. And everyone would roll their eyes, but also find it sweet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	5 Times Someone Rolls Their Eyes at Skye and Coulson's Inability to Stop Touching

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RosePark15](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RosePark15/gifts).



 1.

May is relatively certain that she’s the first one to notice when something changes between Coulson and Skye. It’s subtle — at first, at least — but there.

A long time ago, she had taken notice of the way they always stand during briefings. Part of what’s funny about it is that it hasn’t changed — Skye has always stood next to him, always completed his sentences, always caught his eye too often. And he’s always done exactly the same.

And then one day, standing around the holocom, their arms brush, and the contact is accompanied by Skye smiling up at Coulson, somewhere between sweet and knowing. He returns it, and May could swear he’s about to blush. He sways towards her more as he speaks, until their arms are pressed together and their hands occupy almost the same space on the corner of the table.

It would be a lie to say that it doesn’t bother her a little. Coulson has always been negative about romantic entanglements within SHIELD. She doesn’t think about Ward — consciously blocks him out most of the time — but she doesn’t even have to think of him to remember Coulson loudly frowning on such at relationships. His belief that something will somehow always go wrong. Someone will always have to make some difficult choice.

She’s thinking really hard about how she’ll needle him about his own hypocrisy when it occurs to her that no one else at the table seems to be noticing anything out of the ordinary.

It’s because they’re still fully engaged, still spelling out the mission they’ve designed. They’re still exactly the same as they’ve always been, except with their arms touching and their pinky fingers overlapping just off the edge of the table.

After the meeting, she turns the corner out of the briefing room when she hears Skye teasing Coulson.

“People are going to figure us out pretty quickly if you keep doing that, _sir_.”

“Good.” He's so casually  _certain_ in a way that Phil Coulson always is about everything except his love life.  _  
_

“Yeah?” She sounds completely smitten. There are several seconds of silence punctuated by a wet smack and a giggle.

“This isn’t something I want to keep in the bedroom,” Coulson tells her, the words clearly muttered in between kisses. Based on his disappointed moan, May surmises that Skye is the one that breaks away.

“May seemed pretty frowny about it, though.”

“My fault. I’ve always been...wary of relationships within teams.”

“Why’s that?”

“Besides personal problems influencing work, having that kind of tie can make it difficult to make hard calls.”

“Is this where we promise that we’ll stay professional no matter what? Because I can do that. But I can’t promise that I’ll make any hard call that puts you in danger.”

“I already turned the world upside down to save your life,” he murmurs.

“So did I,” she answers, and May smiles at the fierceness in her voice. Skye’s protectiveness of Coulson is what endeared the girl to her in the first place. “I’d do it again,” she promises, “whether or not we were doing this.”

“Me, too.”

She hears them start kissing again and rolls her eyes, heads back to the cockpit. But she can’t quite bite back a little shadow of a smile.

 

2.

“Skye, honestly.” Simmons rolls her eyes as she glances down to where the girl has managed to wrap her fingers around Director Coulson’s again. “He’s _fine_ . You can step back and let me work, _please_.”

Skye was the one that got to him first, the one who found him bloody and in pain and not knowing how bad it was, and it makes sense that she would be so upset. Especially given that she and Coulson have been...together, now, for over a month.

She’s not heartless, honestly. If anyone understands how painful it is to see someone you care about injured, it’s Jemma Simmons. But the bullet barely grazed Coulson’s shoulder. There’s blood, yes, and no small quantity of it. But there’s also no real muscular damage.

“Sorry, Simmons,” Skye whispers, and Simmons feels bad. Really bad.

“I understand,” she says, trying to smile, trying to portray her best bedside manner. (She has good bedside manner, really, though there’s a reason she went more into the R&D side of things.)

Coulson just smiles at both of them, shaking his head in amusement at both Skye’s worry and Simmons’s annoyance.

He certainly isn’t letting go of Skye’s fingers in a hurry, though.

When Skye finally moves away from the table, Simmons watches as their fingers draw apart slowly, as though not touching is physically difficult.

“Just for a moment,” she promises, smiling earnestly as she moves around Coulson, applies the last bit of antibiotic and bandage.

When Simmons steps back, admiring her handiwork, Skye’s hand is entwined with Coulson’s again instantly, her whole body pressed against his good side.

“Thank you, Jemma,” Coulson tells her, shooting her a softer smile that she normally associates with her boss. She nods, once, and walks into the back room to wash her hands.

A glance back reveals Skye carefully brushing her fingers around the fresh bandage and whispering something in Coulson’s ear, which makes him smile wider than a man who has just been shot should probably ever smile. Skye leans forward, then, and places a row of kisses down his neck and around the bandage, laying a soft one over the top.

Simmons supposes that, all things considered, they’re rather cute.

 

3.

Fitz rolls his eyes when he walks into the lab and sees Skye and Coulson jointly hunched over her laptop. Or, rather, Skye is sitting at her laptop and Coulson is behind her on a stool, positioned with his legs on either side of her and his arms wrapped around her waist. His chin rests on her shoulder, and as Fitz gets closer he can hear a whispered conversation.

“So where did you learn that one?”

“That’s a pretty low level exploit,” she responds, teasing him as her fingers fly over the keyboard in a quick sequence before becoming still again. It works like that, Fitz knows from watching her — intense bursts of activity and long periods of boredom.

“I’d never be able to pick this up, would I?”

She laughs and turns her head just enough that their noses touch, that she brushes her lips against his.

“If you picked it up, then you wouldn’t need me anymore,” she tells him.

“Never happen,” he answers, bringing his lips back to hers. “I just want to understand everything about you.”

Skye grins against his lips and returns the kiss for a moment before pulling away, turning back towards her screen.

“You remember I told you about my group in Austin —”

“The one that got in trouble with the city for hacking all the electronic signs to announce the zombie apocalypse?”

“That’s the one,” she replies, laughing. “So we used to play this game, basically…”

Fitz walks back out of the lab, fairly sure neither of them even noticed his presence.

He’s learned a lot about Skye in the time she’s been with them, and some of it has been pretty surprising. Like that she’s seriously a genius. Really. He’s always been more of a hardware man, but he’s done enough CS to understand that Skye gets things in a way that’s beyond him. It’s damned impressive, and he feels bad that it took him so long to understand how good she is at what she does.

He thinks Coulson might be one of the first people Skye has ever had that talks to her like this — like she’s the genius that she is. And even though he can’t hear the words, he can hear the happiness in her voice as she talks about her work and her past.

He thanks his lucky stars for Simmons, who, even if they’ll never be more than best friends, has always been that to him — someone who appreciates his genius and lets him talk about the most important facet of his life. Reminds himself to always be that for her.

Having his boss act like a besotted fool in his lab space isn’t his idea of fun, but it’s nice to see someone as good as Skye get exactly the kind of attention and care that she deserves. It brings a smile to his face.

 

4.

Billy walks into the lounge area to see Skye and Coulson on the couch — Skye sprawled across the Director’s chest, fast asleep, while he watches a movie. He’s got one leg bent up and pressed against the back of the couch so that Skye is settled between his legs intimately, but not obscenely. Coulson runs a gentle hand up and down her back, like he’s soothing her, but his eyes are fixed on the television.

There’s literally nothing untoward going on, just the Director watching a movie and the most junior member of their team sleeping, but Billy still blushes at the sight of it. He does that a lot around the two of them — like every time he walks into Coulson’s office and finds Skye in Coulson’s lap or Coulson curled around her on the couch.

Something about the way they are together, even when they’re not kissing (which he’s also walked in on more times than he’d prefer to count), just feels so private. So personal.

At first, he’d found the whole thing inappropriate, but he’s been won over in the last few months, both by them — by the fact that they seem to work _better_ when Skye is in Coulson’s lap — and by the way Coulson is envisioning a new SHIELD. He talks about protection, but he also talks about _people_ , and Billy knows just enough to put together that a lot of that change is because of Skye.

Billy nods at Coulson, pauses just long enough to turn and look at the TV — something black and white and French and not really his thing — and is about to be on his way when Skye starts to shift around on Coulson’s chest.

“Hmmm,” Skye moans as she stirs awake, her whole body moving against his as she leans in enough to place a series of kisses against his neck. “You’re happy to see me,” she mumbles in between kisses as her hips move over his in a more distinctly sexual rhythm.

The two men lock eyes, and Billy can’t even describe the expression on Coulson’s face — embarrassed, yes, but also far too pleased with unfolding events. One of his hands grips tightly at Skye’s hip, nominally keeping her from moving too much but also _not stopping her_.

Quickly, Billy rushes from the room, cheeks flushed pink, and rolls his eyes at the fact that the Director of SHIELD can’t seem to keep it in the bedroom.

 

5.

It’s somewhere between too late at night and too early in the morning, and Trip slips out to find a glass of water. He hears them first — whispers that sound almost heated and a quiet smack of lips — and he rolls his eyes at the thought that his boss is getting off in the kitchen of all places.

He almost turns around before he notices that the whispers aren’t sexy, but rather sad and softly pleading. It’s instinct more than a real desire to know that has him tiptoeing just far enough around the corner to see them.

Coulson is leaning into the counter — palms against the granite, back to the room, head down — and Skye is leaning into his back, one hand wrapped around his chest to rest over his heart while the other holds onto his hip.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

“You you don’t have to be sorry. _Please_ don’t be sorry. Just let me help you.”

She nuzzles her face between his shoulder blades, and Trip hears the sound of her placing kisses along Coulson’s spine.

He was the last one to put together that there was anything different between Skye and Coulson, but it’s only because he hadn’t realized that there was anything _to_ change.

He had figured something was going on between them the first time he met Coulson, when the man was ready to tear apart heaven and earth to save her life. And Ward may have been the one who snapped at Thomas Nash’s taunting about her (except, no, he has to remind himself, Ward shot that man in cold blood), but Trip saw the look on Coulson’s face. Everyone in SHIELD had seen the look on Coulson’s face, _had to have seen_ that the man was completely in love with the girl. 

When he first joined up, Trip had to wonder at why no one else on the team found it strange that a Level 8 agent placed such weight, such importance, on the ideas of a newbie. Of course, it hadn't taken long before it stopped seeming so strange — Skye is smart and a fighter and she and Coulson have a clear working rapport. And Coulson places more importance on the ideas of all of his team than any leader Trip has ever seen.

Still, when they came out, almost six months ago, and announced their relationship to the rest of the team, Trip was actually a little surprised at how surprised the rest of the team was.

The truth is that seeing his superior officer’s softer side like this isn’t something he thought he’d ever get. Although God knows Garrett didn’t have much of a softer side, and if he did Trip is glad he never got to see it.

So it’s different, but it’s a good different. A reminder that strong leadership isn’t about denial and pain and grief, but rather about trust and teamwork and overcoming setbacks. It gives SHIELD a human face, it makes him feel like he’s fighting for love and friendship and fraternity and all of the things that were the most important in his grandfather's stories.

Trip waves his hand in Skye’s direction, and she turns her head to see him. He points at the faucet, and she smiles, draws her head away from Coulson’s back.

“Hi,” she greets him, looking tired and overwhelmed and also in love. He can see Coulson pull himself together, can see some tension return to his back, but it’s still a softer man that greets him — standing in the kitchen in sweat pants just before four in the morning.

“Agent Triplett.” Coulson nods at him, meets his eyes as though this isn’t strange, so Trip pretends that it isn’t. He takes a glass down from the cabinet, fills it with water, and turns to leave the kitchen.

“Night,” he calls as he leaves the small space, looking back to see Coulson embracing Skye, pulling her smaller body hard against his own and placing soft kisses against the top of her head.

He’s glad they have each other, and he’s even more glad that he’s operating under the leadership of a team like the two of them make.

 

 


End file.
